To me, beauty is looks you can never forget. A face should jolt, not soothe.

I keep very close in touch with the fans - to see what they like. I'm very in touch with my audience; I get older and they get younger, which I think is the ultimate compliment. I think hitchhiking brought a few of them out! Even though all young people have never hitchhiked, all people my age did at one point in their life, they just don't do it now.

If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.

My films can be considered political action against the tyranny of good taste.

Life is a rotten lottery.

At the premiere of Hairspray on Broadway, Harvey Fierstein's mom said to my mom, "Didn't we raise great sons?" and my mother just started sobbing, because I'm sure they'd both been through other nights when people didn't say that.

What's fascinating to me is that in rich-kid schools, it's better to be gay. No one is discriminated against because they're gay in a rich-kid school. But in poor-kid schools, it's often not the same. So being gay is a class issue now.